Rush before the Dive (1st @ Finnish RAM asynch)

Trying to outrun Padma with Deep Dive + boat and drawing your first seamless turn 10.

This is the corp I took to the first place of the Finnish RAM async. Here is my runner deck

Our cardpool was: Honor and Profit, System Gateway, A Study in Static, Business First, Down the White Nile, Earth's Scion, Fear the Masses, Intervention, Kala Ghoda, Mala Tempora, Midnight Sun, Quorum, Station One, The Liberated Mind.

e:sg|hap|ftm|bf|in|dtwn|kg|ms|tlm|qu|eas|so|asis|mt

I tried several different ways to go, but in the end the King set me straight: you need to counter boat Padma with Deep Dive and Out of the Ashes. The best way to counter that is to win before they dive. Thus PD with all the speed cards you can get. And this is exactly that, no more, no less.

Anyways, it went 4-0.

I toyed around with several corp ideas, but they did not play out in the end:

• Accelerated Diagnostics + Hasty Relocation. This looked cool and tempting, there is even Power Shutdown with original text (ie. no errata). But alas, no Jackson, which makes this immediately weaker. The best combos I came up with used Red Planet Couriers, but that is reaaaaally slow and you can’t even combine it with double Neurospike to win instantly. And even if you could, that would mean you have built a 6-card combo with 5-card hand limit so Hasty AD will probably happen only from CI.

• Rigshoot R+. There is no runner recursion, so you could at least in theory try to lock them out with Drago+Dedication. But with boat in the meta you need to pull Retribution off at least 5 times (2x fracter/decoder and 3x boat) to truly lock them out. That is a great goal with max 3 copies of said retribution. And then they can still have Botulus or Mayfly… And they can just click for credits and install breakers once you try to score. Plus NFL. Plus Aaron Marrón. So tag-based rigshoot was an idea that was too cute for this world.

• Asset spam Jinteki. There were both Mitosis and Mushin in the pool so this was tempting. But: while you can pull some shenanigans with Psychic Field and Fumiko Yamamori, if runner does not run your combo-triggering card you have nothing and I don’t like to leave games up to my opponent guessing wrong. And even if they run, you need to actually win the psi game. You do have Clearinghouse, but no Cerebral and anyways in the end that boils down to ”guess where to run and where not to” Also no PE, RP or Mwekundu makes asset plans weaker.

• Something with Regenesis. Could work, but see above for not leaving the games up to what opponent decides to do.

• Something from Ob. There is no Formicary or HHN, so it was hard to find out how to pressure runner. Still there might be a deck here, but I did not have time to figure it out.

After all is said and janked, there is a good established archetype with good game against the best runner of the pool and some busted cards to add from standard banlist and rotated pool. In the end, I guess it wasn’t really a choice.

Sooo the actual description. I think there are two viable PDs. Jinja+VLC with more defensive upgrades and Stinson + Big Deal. I ended up with the first one since Stinson usually does not help if drawn late, depends on your opponents help to get it to fire and even with big deal, actually converting those creds to win feels clunky and remains vulnerable to HQ multiaccess.

• Agenda suite. Tempo positive agendas with Seamless and PD recursion is the bread and butter of the deck so agendas are all the money and tempo you can get. SSL is scary as it is a real 3-pointer, but it makes sure you are not going to be poor. Corporate Sales Team is way too slow, but it gives you some money, which is more than the rest of the contestants for the slot would give. Fast Track also supports the jamming strategy quite a lot.

• Jinja+VLC. I've always had a place in my heart for Jinja PD. There was no Tranquility Home Grid so that also made the choice easy. VLC is super busted econ card that tries to balance the numbers with the built-in implication of the 'terminal'-keyword that you have to discard something afterwards. The solution ofc is to bypass the implication and install the ice clicklessly while you draw it so it never ends up cluttering your HQ and you gain 'even more' value in the process.

• Anoetic, Manegarm and Mavirus as your regular defensive upgrades. Mavirus also counters Tapwrm clicklessly, which is probably even more important than a rare Botulus-trap.

• Ice suite. All the good ICE from the pool. Whitespace is cheap enough to make a difference: ICE you can't rez is a dead card anyways. Mestnichestvo was something for 2 spare influence and with a counter, introduced a reliable tax. You can also Seamless this, if you have extra copy you no longer need. Magnet because Botulus is in the pool. I did not play Ravana 1.0 since it does nothing as a first ICE rezzed and you try to go so fast, every ICE needs to work as your first ICE. It also has 2 subroutines which is bad against boat and I did not have enough bioroid support for it anyways.

• Special mention to Vanilla, which single-handedly won me few games. Great gearcheck and a perfect boat hate for any runner who thinks they don't need to install their Cleaver.

This has some problems. Mainly if your opponent draws Light the Fire! and/or Pinhole Threading at the right moment you are screwed. Fortunately you are so fast, they can't always find all the tools in time and even if they wreck your remote, you can usually just jam more stuff there until they can't contest anymore.

I don't think I'd change a card, but the ICE suite can be discussed for preferences. There is a case to be made for only 2-pointers in agenda suite, but that would mean you too have to score 4 times and SSL is on a banlist for a reason. And you reaaally don't want to score four times when you're trying to rush. Plus Fast Track -> install -> advance helps you jam it straight from the (relative) safety of your RnD, with Seamless Launch scoring it next turn.

Thanks for Pawndawan for organizing and all the players for the great tournament. On Corp deck, special shoutout goes to The King for making me skip the nonsense daydreams and play a solid deck. Other mentions go to iceprisma, helmi, September and team Unband for all help with testing and theorycrafting.